Posts Tagged ‘lowell’

Elizabeth Boland – aka Lowell – did a week-long music and art workshop at Stolper + Friends in Oslo earlier this month, following her concerts at the Go With The Flø festival. Entitled Sex cells – sound and vision under the influence, the workshop was held between 1 – 7 July.

Here’s a quote from her Facebook page:

“Many people came out to the concerts at night, and one night we had Robyn Hitchcock (The Soft Boys) with Norwegian indie rock band “I was a King”. One day we also had a stunning violin duo playing violin and the saw along with me. Other days, Magne F (a-ha, Apparatjik) and I jammed out for hours on various distortion instruments until our fingers were tired.”

Over the last week, Lowell has been posting audio clips on Soundcloud from the two-hour jam session she did with Magne on July 3rd. Here are the links:Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4

Magne, Martin and Jonas did their first Apparatjik concert of the year on Friday, May 3rd, with a 14-song set at the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) in Copenhagen.

A reviewer at Danish music website Gaffa praises the “extremely well planned audiovisual bombardment of the senses” and gives the concert 5 out of 6 stars. Although he feels the music lacks an emotional quality, he says the show “worked incredibly well throughout its compact 49 minutes”.

Guy Berryman attended Magne’s exhibition opening in London on Thursday, but did not join the others for the concert in Copenhagen. The busy Coldplay-bassist last performed with Apparatjik in March 2011, and has been replaced with a stand-in at every performance since then.

Lowell had taken the trip over from Canada, though, and came on stage to do her two songs “Shake Him Off” and “The Birds”.

Magne and a few other Apparatjiks are on the cover of the January 2013 issue of Norwegian culture magazine Aftenposten K. Inside there is an 8-page interview with Magne, Martin Terefe and Jonas Bjerre, which was done in connection with the apparatjik xmess extravaganza performance in Oslo last month.

According to the magazine, Apparatjik were recently asked to do a tour of the U.S., but they declined the offer.

“That’s because we only do the projects that we want to. Agreeing to do a tour means that you also have to be interviewed, you have to sell yourself, promote heavily. But then you’re suddenly doing what you wanted to break away from in the first place”, Magne says.

In the interview he also talks about how they prepared for the festival concert at Roskilde, by imagining that this was the first time anyone had come up with the radical idea of performing on stage in front of an audience.

But as we know, they have later played inside the cube again.

“The cube still exists. It’s a kind of refuge that we sometimes escape into. But it shouldn’t become an institution. It was exciting to see the [audience] reactions in the beginning, but now it’s become just another tool”, Martin Terefe says.

“That’s true. But I think that if we hadn’t performed inside the cube to start with, Roskilde would never have turned out as it did either. (…) Roskilde felt incredibly new and unconventional, because we emerged from the cube. However strange that may seem”, Magne says.

The magazine is now available on Norwegian newsstands and as an iPad edition.

The main event – tonight’s free concert at Astrup Fearnley – starts at 9:00 PM and features a new cube.

“The new cube is made especially for this show. We were originally planning on positioning it above the water, but they’re expecting a spring tide, and combined with 220 volts through our instruments that wasn’t such a good idea”, Magne says in an interview with Dagsavisen today.

Guy Berryman once again seems to be busy with Coldplay, so he’s not taking part.

Magne, along with Jonas Bjerre and Martin Terefe, attended the official opening of the new Astrup Fearnley museum in Oslo today. There’s a photo gallery from the event at vg.no.

Afterwards, they were guests on the radio programme Kulturnytt on NRK P2, to talk about their first impressions of the museum and the upcoming Apparatjik performance there on Saturday.

Magne was asked how the Apparatjik concept will fit in at the Astrup Fearnley museum:

“I don’t think it fits at all, because we’ve made it a specialty to fall between two stools. Most people in the art world think we’re way too pop-oriented. And those expecting to hear pop music think we’re too arty. So we have ended up somewhere in between, where we don’t manage to connect with anyone. But we do create music that we like, and the songs are quite structured. We’re not attempting to create very inaccessible stuff. We just don’t want to do things the way we’ve used to in our main projects.

We were shocked when we entered the stage at Roskilde this summer and looked out on an audience of 40.000 – 50.000 people, who stood with their jaws dropped for the first 15 minutes and then ended up jumping up and down to music they had never heard before. It was very exciting. I had never entered the stage before, without having at least a few hits to get the audience going. So it was incredibly fun. I think people with a certain sense of humour will feel this is something they should witness. And it takes place on Saturday at 9:00 PM”, Magne said.

“It’s important to stress that this is not a concert for the elite, but a free concert for the people of Oslo – and anyone who comes from out of town. We’re going to create a lot of noise, so this is not a part of those posh opening ceremonies”, he added.

Tonight, Apparatjik and Lowell did a “secret” warm-up show at DogA – the Norwegian Centre for Design and Architecture in Oslo. A few pictures were posted on Instagram by Monika and Tini from The Voice.

Be also sure to check out a couple of new videos from the Roskilde concert on Vimeo, here and here.